In handing out the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting this month, the prize committee praised the Daily Breeze newspaper of Torrance, Calif., for its “impressive use of the paper’s website” in detailing widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district. The newspaper’s online coverage included use of the Knight Lab’s TimelineJS, a free platform that helps journalists create content-rich timelines to supplement news coverage.

The Knight Lab's website guides timeline creators through four steps of instructions, beginning with creation of a Google spreadsheet from a template. Users enter dates, text and links to media in provided columns and then publish to the web.

“It made a very nice presentation,” she said. “We probably wouldn’t have built something as slick.”

Sciacqua said newspapers such as hers don’t have the resources to hire software developers to build such platforms. “We want to spend our time figuring out the journalism part, not the technology part,” she said.

It’s the second Pulitzer in three years associated with the Knight Lab. The Denver Post won for breaking-news reporting in 2013 for its coverage of a mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, and its online coverage featured a TimelineJS presentation, said Joe Germuska, the lab’s interim director.

The Knight Lab was founded in 2010 with the help of a $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It’s run jointly by the university’s Medill School of Journalism and the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Germuska said the facility aims to help journalists use new technology that they couldn’t otherwise afford. He said the lab would love to find ways to create revenue streams for its products. For now, though, the tools remain free and open-sourced.

Other Knight Lab platforms include SoundCiteJS, which allows sound clips to be embedded in content; JuxtaposeJS, which makes frame comparisons — typically before-and-after shots — easy to create and publish; StoryMapJS, which helps users embed content into maps; and twXplorer, a tool for searching Twitter.

TimelineJS is the lab’s most popular tool, having been translated into 60 languages, said Ryan Graff, the lab’s community and outreach manager. Content using the tool has generated more than 180 million page views, he said. He pointed out that the Baltimore Sun, a sister publication of the Chicago Tribune, has been using the platform in its coverage of Freddie Gray's death and the ensuing unrest in Baltimore.

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Germuska, a former Chicago Tribune newsroom employee, said the lab attracts journalism students looking to broaden their skills and computer science majors looking for important projects.

“Computer science students come here because products happen here,” he said. “This is a place where you can go and actually make a thing.”